Can't access specific content in html page with rvest and selectorGadget - html

Question

I'm trying to scrape a ncbi website (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/29436380) to obtain information of a protein. I need to access the gene_synonyms and GeneID fields. I have tried to find the relevant nodes with the selectorGadget addon in chrome and with the code inspector in ff. I have tried this code:
require("dplyr")
require("rvest")
require("stringr")
GIwebPage <- read_html("https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/29436380")
TestHTML <- GIwebPage %>% html_node("div.grid , div#maincontent.col.nine_col , div.sequence , pre.genebank , .feature") %>% html_text(trim = TRUE)
Then I try to find the relevant text but it is simply not there.
str_extract_all(TestHTML, pattern = "(synonym).{30}")
[[1]]
character(0)
str_extract_all(TestHTML, pattern = "(GeneID:).{30}")
[[1]]
character(0)
All I seem to be accessing is some of the text content of the column on the right.
str_extract_all(TestHTML, pattern = "(protein).{30}")
[[1]]
[1] "protein codes including ambiguities a"
[2] "protein sequence for myosin-9 (NP_00"
[3] "protein should not be confused with t"
[4] "protein, partial [Homo sapiens]gi|294"
[5] "protein codes including ambiguities a"
I have tried so many combinations of nodes selections with html_node() that I don't know anymore what to try. Is this content buried in some structure I can't see? or I'm just not skilled enough to realize the node to select?
Thanks a lot,
José.

Answer 1

The page is dynamically loading the information. The underlying information is store at another location.
Using the developer tools from your bowser, look for the link:
The information you are looking for is store at the "viewer.fcgi", right click to copy the link.
See similar question/answers: R not accepting xpath query